I taught myself playing the violin. Some years ago I borrowed my grandmothers violin and just started fiddling around until I could play some very simple songs like “Happy Birthday” and such. Sincere apologies to my close family at that time, they really had a lot of patience as it must have sounded horrible. Some time later I played at some concerts of the local YMCA youth group. On a stage!

Still, I can’t read a single note and have no idea of music theory. Tell me to play in “E major” and I would have no clue what you mean. I can merely play by ear.

I also taught myself coding. Well, I learned the basics of Java programming in school, but I kept on learning beyond that. My first projects were the typical mess that you’d expect from a beginner which has no idea what they are doing. Later I studied computer science and now I’m just a few credit points away from getting my masters degree. Yet, the university is not the place where you learn to code. They do teach you the basics of how a computer works, what a compiler is and even the theory behind creating your own compilers, but they hardly teach you how to write *good* code.

Sometimes I feel like I code just as I play the violin. By instinct. I’m not following any rules or well defined procedures. I roughly know where I want to go and more or less how to get there. Then I just start and see where it leads me. I wouldn’t say that I write bad code, but I also don’t feel like I got the ultimate understanding of what good code is. Most certainly I wouldn’t describe my coding process as “methodical” or “planned”.

So, my question is, how to learn to write *good* code? How do I acquire the skills to write “professional” code? During my Google Summer of Code projects I found that having a mentor was massively helping me to write cleaner, more concise code. So should I join a company as junior software developer in order to be able to learn from the senior developers? Can I just hike into the mountains and find an old man in a cave who teaches me the ancient art of the JVM?

I tried reading some books. I soaked up the Uncle Bob trilogy (especially “Clean Architecture”), not least because I recognized many of the patterns Martin described in that book from my coding adventures. But books are just books and they cannot answer all the questions one might have.

I thought about attending some software engineering related conferences to listen to talks by the greybeards. But then there is this Covid thing (although I hope that vaccines and such will improve the situation soon-ish).

Now that I’m earning some money by writing code, I fell like I have the duty to elevate my skills from “I know some things about what I’m doing” into a proper craftsmanship.

But how do I start? Should I do some courses? Are there any courses that might be fitting?

Let me know if you have any advise or experiences that you think could help me.

Happy Hacking.